The population of the world as I write this, at CET 8 PM on Tuesday March 29th, 2016, is estimated to be 7,411,904,385 people. At the dawn of agriculture, about 8000 B.C., the population of the world was approximately 5 million. Over the 8,000-year period up to 1 A.D. it grew to 200 million, with… Continue reading If the World Were 100 People
Category: Globalization
The Explosion of Globalisation
Conventional wisdom says that globalisation has stalled. Measured by trade statistics, the flows of goods and money to pay for goods are slowing down and even reversing. The Financial Times wrote today, that the value of goods and services which crossed international borders last year fell by 13,8%, in the first contraction since 2009. Much… Continue reading The Explosion of Globalisation
The Global Economy since 1980 in 20 seconds
Many of my friends were born around 1980. It was the same year I entered high school and also the same year I travelled around in Europe for the first time, the brave teenager I was. Back then I had to show my passport at all borders and I got proper passport stamps. The world… Continue reading The Global Economy since 1980 in 20 seconds
Global Growth in 2016 – Cities Carrying the Weight of Nations
Growth in global trade volumes has slowed in recent years, thanks to a slow economic recovery from the financial crisis, increased use of internet based services which is not tracked in statistics, and the changing structure of the Chinese economy. Maybe also new production techniques with cheaper local production in the advanced economies can be… Continue reading Global Growth in 2016 – Cities Carrying the Weight of Nations
The new Global Competition for Corporate Profits
The world’s largest multinational corporations have been riding a three-decade wave of profit growth, market expansion, and declining costs. Yet this unprecedented run may be coming to an end. A new McKinsey Global Institute report, Playing to win: The new global competition for corporate profits, projects that the global corporate-profit pool, which currently stands at… Continue reading The new Global Competition for Corporate Profits
The Shifting Global Business Landscape
Emerging markets are changing where and how the world does business. For the last three decades, emerging markets have been a source of low-cost but increasingly skilled labour. Their fast-growing cities are filled with millions of new and increasingly prosperous consumers, who provide a new growth market for global corporations at a time when much… Continue reading The Shifting Global Business Landscape
The Worlds Largest Cities – 1955 and 2015
The last six decades have been a period of rapid urbanisation. More than half of the world’s population now live in cities and towns, compared to just over a third in 1955, and that figure is expected to grow to two-thirds by 2050, meaning a projected additional 2.5 billion people living in urban areas. At… Continue reading The Worlds Largest Cities – 1955 and 2015
The Cities Which Will Contribute Most to Global Growth in 2030
It is the world’s major cities that are the powerhouses of global growth. Teeming with industry and services, brimming with innovation, and home to booming and increasingly more skilled and diverse labour forces, the world’s 750 biggest cities today account for some 57% of global GDP. According to a study by Oxford Economics earlier this… Continue reading The Cities Which Will Contribute Most to Global Growth in 2030
Cities and the Rise of the Consuming Class
A new McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) report, Urban World: Cities and the rise of the consuming class, analyses the massive wave of urbanization that is propelling growth across the emerging world in the coming decades. The research expands MGI analysis of the top 2,600 cities globally, building on firm statistics which includes demographics, household structure,… Continue reading Cities and the Rise of the Consuming Class
The Power of the Informal Economy
Robert Neuwirth’s presentation at The Future of Places III conference which we published two weeks ago was very popular with the readers of this blog, so here is Neuwirth’s Ted Talk from 2012 with more thoughts about the power of the informal economy. For those of us who have visited, the mere mention of Lagos,… Continue reading The Power of the Informal Economy